


In Flesh

by lovelyophelia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Demisexuality, First Time, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-06-20
Packaged: 2017-11-04 02:20:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyophelia/pseuds/lovelyophelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I ignored the signs, immersed myself in my work, and tried to focus on my mind. Because that was what mattered; that was the only thing that mattered. The rest was all transport. Except it was so much harder, now, that I had felt for one moment, your flesh on mine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Seeing

**Author's Note:**

> I recommend [this beautiful piece](http://threegifproblem.tumblr.com/post/21528475843/olafur-arnalds-33-26-from-his-debut) by Ólafur Arnalds as backing music.
> 
>  _In Flesh_ is a two-chapter fic.

_‘Breathe, Sherlock.’_

There was a row of houses.

_‘It’s alright.’_

The perpetual grey of a London street.

_‘You’re okay.’_

The uniform white of an English sky.

_‘Come away.’_

The sudden splash of red on the dirty pavement.

I looked, and I saw, but I still did not comprehend.

It was a Tuesday. An April. A day not worth remarking upon, in a month of no particular consequence – excepting the temporary annoyance of extra tourists in London cabs.

It was tedious in its mediocrity.

You woke with the clockwork precision of a military man. I heard you humming as you completed your morning routine – the shower, the necessary brushing of teeth, all that messy, human business.

How could you hum, John? I didn’t recognise the tune. Something happy, something upbeat, something you most likely had heard on the radio and repeated, unwittingly, without words.

You sounded happy.

Why were you happy, John?

I hate showers. I loathe eating. I detest sleeping. It has taken me twenty-five years to not disregard basic hygiene – or rather, to recognise the pros (45% elevated social success rate, no itchy chin) as being worth the cons (10-15 minutes of tedium every day)

Except it wasn’t just tedious, was it?

Standing there, limp and exposed, hot water rushing around me – I am confronted again and again with my own mortality, my own limitations. These are my hands. I grasp them, now, around the showerhead and marvel at their pink and white foam-flecked weakness. They are just like any other hands. This body is just like any other body. It fulfils a purpose.

This is my body. This is my transport. This is my shell. It is long, and lean, and adequate.

But it is not me, really.

If someone was to murder me, they would have to destroy more than skin and bones. Moriarty knew this. He understood, implicitly, what you and every other humming idiot never could. That is why, when I stood on the rooftop, he knew he had won. Not just my transport was to come crashing down with me, but my name, my reputation, my work.

That, I think, dousing my head under the hot water, is my true substance.

I am a creature of vapour and lies and cogs that whir and gears that tick and more than a dash of misdirection to oil the whole thing along. I am furious, magnetic energy. I am a name, and a presence, and a voice.

I am a coat collar turned up to look cool.

But not you, John (and now I am back in the kitchen, listening to you hum and curse as you go on with that frightfully tedious business of living). If someone were to ravage your flesh, you truly would be destroyed.

You are too ordinary. Too fragile. Too delicate.

That is why I cannot allow myself to get closer to you.

You do not understand, you cannot understand, this divorce of feelings and flesh, of reason and rationality.

You hum in the shower. You enjoy the simple process of being alive.

That is why, later, when the wind slams into me like a knife and my coat billows out behind me, I know that I am crying. Not for myself, or the temporary dent in my reputation. I am crying for you, because the man who hums in the shower will see only death in my defeat.

And, that is why, when I have returned and you are ashen with shock and half-gasping, half-nauseated, I simply stand there and allow you to gently, timidly, reach up and touch the place where my head had been open and bleeding. I do not flinch, I do not scowl, I do not try to hide and hunt and kill the sudden spreading warmth in my chest. I simply stare back down at you, your eyes and lips so open and tender and shocked, like a child, like a lover – like someone who needs, desperately, to trace the physical with his fingertips and thus posses it.

Sex is a form of possession - or so I am told. There are those who eat their lovers, consume them, take them inside until there are only bones and ashes and whirling, swirling, motes in the sunlight. I have more in common with those people than with you, John.

And that is why when you reached up and pressed your mouth to mine in a sudden rush of hot breath and unspoken longing, I fought to keep my eyes open and my knees straight and my fingers from clawing, convulsively, in your hair.

I fought, but I did not fight John Watson’s war.

I fought my own war.

I believed in Sherlock Holmes, and I won.

The embarrassment in your eyes when you realised I wasn’t a participant in this exchange – more a hostage, a polite, confused, uncomprehending  (honestly, John, when have you ever known me to be polite or confused?). That little half-cough of shame, the lowered eyes, the sudden step back – the defiant jut of shoulders that said _I am John Watson and I will overcome!_

The unbearable, unbelievable heartbreak.

It took all my strength not to leap forward and raise your chin with one long finger and stare directly into the warmth of those eyes, to not rush forward in a tangle of long arms and legs, surrounding you, engulfing you, pressing my mouth to yours in a series of non-verbal exchanges, sweet ones, sad ones, long ones, short one, ones that said _I’m sorry_ and ones that said _I can’t_ and ones that said _this year has been hell for me_ and even a deep one, a secret one that said, _I wouldn’t do this with anyone other than you._

But the moment passed, as all moments do, with you staring at the carpet as if it was the most interesting thing you had ever seen in your life, and my lips still stinging with the sheer force of your love.

Then, a cough. A shrug. A fractionally-altered set of his shoulders. Captain John Watson, reporting for duty. Here to solider on through whatever awful set of cards life dealt him with next. You raised your head, now, and stared at me with eyes so black and intense that some distant part of me, long-lost and hidden in the folder marked ‘not-useful’,  tingled and shivered and moaned.

‘Sorry,’ you said, ‘It’s been...I missed you.’

I was aware, suddenly, that I was staring at you in silence. I wondered, in a sudden flash of self-loathing, what you saw in me. A sullen man in a long coat? An unfeeling, reasoning machine? A marble statue, pale white and unspoilt?

And I forced myself to break your heart.

‘Sentiment,’ I scoffed. It was unforgivable, I knew. But this was my own Fall, one not set up or anticipated by Moriarty.  ‘If you’re quite finished, we have a killer to catch. A self-styled Ripper, most dangerous man in England! Should be a corker of a case. Why, even now, three women are dead because of him. This is _brilliant_!’

The words rang out harsh against my tongue, odd and awkward, but you didn’t notice. You were too busy re-assembling the shattered fragments of your life, all the _not-Sherlock_ of the last few months, all the _Sherlock_ of that frantic, bruising moment of lips and air and  -

And suddenly, I was on the floor with my head ringing and my teeth chattering and a sudden desperate ringing in my ears. I blinked my eyes, and saw your face.

‘You _bastard._ ’

Your chest was heaving, your eyes working, spit flying from your mouth.

I suppose this went beyond the category of ‘a bit not good.’

But how to explain? John, my John, how could you begin to understand me? You are a man who hums in the shower and eagerly anticipates the coming day. I skulk in shadows and thrash corpses in the morgue. I break people.

Did you ever consider, when I was falling to my death, that it was for you? Did you ever consider, when I broke your heart, that it was also for you?

‘You can’t just – and now – after all this time –‘

‘I’m sorry,’ the words force their way from my mouth, and I snap my teeth as if I could snatch them back in, destroy them, consume them.

You stared at me, love and hate and hurt and loss and grief and – yes, there was lust there, too – and I swallowed, with half-sickened arousal, that despite all of this, you still wanted me.

And that, I knew, was just one reason why I was forced to push you away. You would never back down, you would never flinch, you would never cringe. You are as addicted to a dangerous substance as me. You need the excitement, the difference, the nastiness – the sheer joy of what the Germans call _unheimlich –_ to round you out and thrill you and smooth you and keep you living your simple life of little joys, of warm showers and toast in the morning.

But it would never be enough for me, and nothing would ever been too much for you.

You stared at me - your beautiful face flushed, eyes glistening, mouth open.

‘They said – you...you did it for me. For all of us.’

I cursed, silently. Then I allowed myself one quick nod. I found myself looking down, breaking eye contact – fascinating response, unusual in myself that I was quick to categorise as _embarrassment._ It felt warm and good and bad and shameful and – that was quite enough of that, and far too much.

You sighed, then a hand was thrust in front of my face. Palm up. A surrender, an invitation, a supplication. _I give up._ It said. And – _I’m so glad you’re home._

‘One thing? Next time, spare us the theatrics.’

As you helped me to my feet, I forced myself to smile.

Afterwards, things returned to normal – about as normal as I was capable of, which, despite what you might think, I know to be fairly abnormal. (I am perfectly capable of self-analysis, John. I just chose not to.)

That one brief moment in the hallway, that not-kiss that we did and did not share, was never replicated or referred to. Though, sometimes, when I hadn’t slept all night and the tedium of my caged pacing was finally broken by your soft firm step on the landing boards, I would find myself suddenly wrenched back, against my will, to the thought of your body against mine and your lips firm and sweet.

Sometimes, when I heard you in the shower, I would look up from an experiment or snap shut a book or throw down my bow with sudden anger and pace, reciting the periodic table. I would do all I could to be less aware, less painfully aware of your naked body so casual, so exposed, just a few meagre walls away. Time and time again, I would measure the distance with my mind.

And then you would appear, freshly-laundered and so clean and happy and tangible and _alive,_ and I would have to restrain myself from rubbing a thumb over your arm when I was talking to you – just to satisfy an irrational, sudden desire to feel your skin under mine.

And that would be our mornings. Our good mornings. Our beautiful times. The ones in which we danced – suspended, and separate, united in our mutual love and longing.

I ignored the signs – the dilated pupils, the heightened pulse, the furtive, shame-filled glances when you thought I wasn’t looking – I ignored them, immersing myself in my work, and tried to focus on my mind. Because that was what mattered, that was the _only_ thing that mattered. The rest was all transport.

Except it was so much harder, now, that I had felt for one moment, your flesh on mine.

_‘Sherlock?’_

_A voice. A face. It came dully._

_‘For God’s sake, someone get this man a blanket.’_

_‘Who would have thought the freak –‘_

_‘Shut it, Donovan. Just get him the bloody blanket.’_

It was all swirling around, and so dreadfully confused. We had left the house that morning in fine spirits. How had this happened?

And now, there I was, grit and dirt and dust in my clenched fists, staring at a smudge of blood on the dull London streets.

‘It’s alright, mate,’ Lestrade’s voice, floating, disembodied, as he spoke the familiar meaningless words of comfort and regret.

Did he do this to you when I died? Did he tell you everything would be okay?

 ‘He had a good life,’ said Lestrade quietly ‘and he died doing something he loved. A good man, a great man. There’s no shame in mourning that, Sherlock.’

‘I’m mourning the life we didn’t live.’

I wasn’t aware of speaking the words until they were already gone, snatched out by the pitiless London wind. I didn’t look around, couldn’t. I just stared at the red smudge on the ground. And, as usual, didn’t see a thing.


	2. Perceiving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Superlatively huge thanks to the amazing Becca. This is for you.

Dark. Cold. The distant rattle and hum of a main road. My eyes snap open.

_October 27th. My room. Blanket kicked off. After three, before five._

As always, my thought process begins before I am fully conscious, trickling in through the thready grogginess of sleep.

My hands are shaking. I stare at them for a moment. Ghostly in the half-dark, I seem a creature not quite real. Half dead. Half alive. What did it matter? I had cheated death. I was still here.

I flex them, now, staring at the delicate pull of tendons under the skin. Back, forth, back again. I turn them over, studied the backs and the palms and the little white lines that run between them. An errant thought, half-pursued in the dark – a flicker of another, more desperate time, under the bridge in the filth of London’s night. A girl, little more than a child, who claimed to be privy to the traces of fate and leavings of destiny that collected, like sweat, in our palms.

_‘It went wrong for me,’ she said, breathing smoke into the star-streaked sky, ‘this wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to be alone like this.’_ _She stroked my hand, once, before I snatched it away._

What utter rubbish. Superstition. No more than a collective of petty people’s hopes and fears. Stupid. Dull. Why was my mind wasting thinking about -

‘John!’ I bellow. My voice is hoarse and rough from sleep. It falls oddly in the cloying dark like a serrated knife on silk.

I lie back and re-calculate. I don’t allow my mind to lead me down idle paths. It doesn’t waste time. It is the machine that inhabits my body – efficient, silent, it does what is required. It leaves the painful, messy process of being to the rest of me. That part of me that threatens, cajoles, flatters, lies and steals.

Silence.

Is it the machine that inhabits my body, or my body that inhabits the machine?

My hands are still shaking. For a sudden, terrifying moment, I find myself utterly confused as to what is real and what false. I teeter, as if on the ledge of a great precipice, staring out into the endless dark.

Moriarty knew that dark. The clever cabbie with the evil eyes – he knew that dark. Had they, too, experienced their moment of teetering, of turning, of doors closing – or opening?

They fell, headfirst, eyes open, staring into the dark.

There had only been one other moment in which I had doubted my abilities, the evidence of my own eyes. Nothing rattled me quite like that – the not knowing. I build everything into knowing and not-knowing – a map of binaries, my London town of black and white. It is good there, and chaotic, and safe. Every inch of it is known and every inch of it is _mine_.

So why, then, was I afraid?

I hadn’t been afraid to die. I hadn’t been afraid when everything I had come to be, everything I built myself up into, came crashing down. Exit, Sherlock Holmes, Reichenbach Hero, Consulting Detective – enter Sociopathic freak, Delusional Junkie, Ordinary Sherlock, stage left.

_John._

I don’t think. I can’t think.

Is it fear, now, that makes my pulse quicken and my mouth dry and my breath catch in my throat with a painful sob? What good did thinking ever do me? All I ever did was _think think think think think –_ but no – as my heart races and my feet slap numbly against the stone-cold floor, I do think, vaguely –

_I’m afraid._

I know that fear. I have studied its shape, become accustomed to its presence, all through the pacing tread of many sleepless nights, the glinting syringes of empty hours, the locked door of –

But I shy away from that thought. I do not allow it the confirmation of my attention. I ignore its presence, refuse to give a name to the form or shape to the substance. It could wait. It would have to wait. It must all just wait, as I lurch through the narrow corridor that spirals and seemed to stretch out endlessly before me as my bare feet slapping on the stone and my sheet billowing behind me and I feel cold and light and afraid and terribly awake and half asleep, all at the same time, like some nightmare. A discordant harmony, a broken equation, a spoiled formula.

_A nightmare._

I stop dead in my tracks, sweat suddenly cold on my neck. I am aware of the science of dreams, the numerous psychological and superstitious significance attributed to the process. As ridiculous and trivial as it may seem, there has been many a crime scene in which the victim or the killer’s deepest fears and darkest desires had first played out in the sequence of nightmares or illusion. The subconscious has never interested me. A youthful flirtation with Freud found me repulsed by the greediness of his physicality, the monsters of his subconscious. Doing what I do, it is inevitable that I would not at times catch fractured glances into the howling gulf lying at the foot of every civilised man and woman. I turn it aside, sanitise it with deductions, rationalise it with logic – stare, fearlessly, into the eye of madness with my magnifying glass and coat collar and scarf around my frighteningly vulnerable, pale, human neck.

I look into the void, and, sometimes, when I cannot sleep, the bastard looks right back at me. So I pace and hurl things across the room and when, finally, after days, I do fall asleep it is thick and deep and silent and everything my waking mind cannot be.

So, I repeat – I understand the science of dreams. Like human emotion, I find a way to utilise it or else brush it aside as unimportant. Whatever can be rationalised can have no hold on me. Or so I thought, once. Long ago.

Sniffing, the fear circled me, waiting to pounce.

It was a nightmare. I had had a nightmare. Why was that so difficult to comprehend?

I saw him, dead before me on the pavement. My hands were tangled in his clothes, smeared in blood and still warm from the heat of his body. He had been so close to me, so dead before me. Just like I had for him.

I shake my head. It’s late, or early. I’m confused. Even the most well-oiled of machines occasionally must break down. I haven’t been sleeping, haven’t been eating – nothing of note to occupy myself with, no intricate puzzles to solve or games to play. Now that man, that master choreographer no longer in play, I was no longer quite feeling myself.

Of course, it was bound to take some time to get used to it – the whole ‘un-dead’ thing. Rejoining the ranks of the living, picking up the threads of my old life, finding them dull and confused and somehow diminished by everything that had gone before. I had changed. I had died, after all. I had scrapes  and scars to prove it.

I would get confused. It was only natural. Only human.

I turn, with a snarl in my throat. My fingers bunch into fists, long nails on my right hand stabbing my flesh. I was Sherlock Holmes. I was so much better than human.

For an immeasurable amount of time, I stand there, suspended between our doors, staring blankly into the half-dark. I’m not sure I thought at all. For the first time, possibly the first time in my life, I shut out my thoughts and allow myself to feel.

My fingertips brush soft wood and cold metal as I open his bedroom door. For a second, as the shadowplay of dark and light danced and spins in front of me, I close my eyes. I take the first step blind across the threshold. My right is hand outstretched, begging. Vulnerable.

My eyes open.

He is lying in his bed, flat on his back but somehow still neat and tidy and compact and for a second the sheer _rightness_ of the scene makes my stomach clench in a half-pleasurable sensation I couldn’t be bothered to categorise.

I was thinking about it, though. Why was I thinking about it?

Holding my breath, I slide a foot forward. John was a light sleeper. It would take very little to wake him. A miscalculated step – a sudden creek, a half-formed word – and he would spring to attention, full of life and light and vigour. My John. My man of action. Always there, ready, waiting, with a gun or a kind word – as and when I required it. His face twitched; a dream, then. More visions of the subconscious. I wonder what his sleeping mind showed him, what monsters plagued his thoughts.

Why do I want to –

No. Stop it. Stop it!

_Caring is not an advantage._

It is a moment or two before I can trust myself to move forward again. Another half-foot of creeping movement. Light on my feet. Sneaking around my parent’s mansion late after dark. Collecting dead mice from traps. Stealing things from Mycroft. I took his reading glasses, the year he left for university.

Another half a step forward. I'm close now, close enough to see his face. John has changed, too. A new way of frowning, a slow sadness that did not rage or blaze but hung on him so heavy and so thick one was only rarely made aware of its presence. All that appeared instead were the sheer unending whispers of its existence - the fracture in the lens, the fly in the ointment. The inevitable had appeared, as was its want, spider-webbing out into little rivets and furrows of mistrust and frowns and silent anger. The slight lessening, the cheapening of that thing, that perfect thing, that lay between us so present and palpable that people misunderstood and took us for a couple. They have to do that, didn’t they? They have to put a name to it, confine us, define us. I understand the impulse, that need to categorise and thus control, but I resent its application to something as important, as fundamental, as, well, us.

It was wrong. Things were wrong.

I find myself staring into John Watson’s face and thinking only of how much I hate myself.

There must have been some noise – some escaped breath, some unconscious sound – that causes his eyelids to flutter and his eyes to open, wide, present, staring into the dark. It only takes a second – less than a second – for his shock at seeing a dark figure looming over him to turn into rage.

I see him fumble for at his bedside table, the illegal gun I know he has hidden there.

‘John,’ I say. Just that, the sound of my voice – mercifully impassive, as smooth and urbane as always – is enough to calm him. His hand drops, dangling enticingly over the edge of the bed.

‘Bloody hell, Sherlock,’ he says. I hear the slight hitch in his breath, the sheer effort to appear natural and unperturbed and dignified at the natural prospect of one’s flatmate creeping in to watch one sleep, ‘You almost gave me a heart attack. Can’t you knock?’

It’s said with a pathetic attempt at a smile. He knows who I am, what I am. What the other people have always known. _Freak_.

My mouth tightens, and suddenly I find myself with nothing to say.

‘Yes well, never mind.’ I swallow hastily and take a hurried half-step back, knocking over some unimportant thing – a lamp, a chair, something. The noise is enough to wake the dead.

‘Sherlock!’

‘Bollocks,’ I mutter, disorientated in the dark. John laughs.

‘Oh, sod it. Was only a hideous Ikea thing Mary got me. Never liked it,’ John seems more comfortable now I’ve discomforted myself, lost some of my posture, my habitual poise, ‘What was it you wanted? Some new lead on the case?’

‘The case?’

‘Um. Yes, the case. The one you’ve been working on all day.’

‘Oh, right. That case. Yes.’

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘What about it?’

‘What about what?’

‘The _case,_ Sherlock!’

‘No. Nothing. No new leads.’

‘So, what then?’

I fidget with the hem of my sheet. It was all I had grabbed in my rush to check him over and sort him out and make sure he was still my John, my beating-heart, flesh-and-blood John. I suddenly become aware of its scrape on my skin, each crease of soft cotton suddenly as heavy as wool.

‘Nothing,’ I say, eventually. ‘I was just...checking.’

‘Checking what?’ John props himself up on his elbows, dawning realisation on his face. ‘Do you do this often? Just wander into peoples’ bedrooms and stare at them sleeping?’

‘Does that alarm you?’

‘Me? No. Though I’m still not sure how _I'm_ the one with the psychiatrist.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Stare at people sleeping.’

‘Oh, well, that’s good to know.’ John falls back and rubs a hand over his eyes. ‘Look, Sherlock, it’s two AM and –‘

‘I don’t care about _other_ people sleeping. Just you.’

John froze, mouth half open. I could see him struggling, running through the Russian roulette of potential responses in his head. Everything was so delicate now, so flawed, so cracked. Nothing was right, nothing was on-kilter. The slightest word or deed and we would set each other off, lurching in opposite directions like planets suddenly freed from their gravitational pull.

I  realise, suddenly, that I am sick of watching him struggle.

‘I had a bad dream,’ I say. The bluntness of the sentence, the simple statement of fact after event, sets my skin crawling. I pull at my sheet, arrange it more tightly around me. A few tufts of my too-long hair fall into my eyes, obscuring my vision. Good. I’m sick of seeing.

‘...a bad dream,’ John repeats, clearly now utterly lost. ‘I...I didn’t think you’d sleep tonight. You don’t usually, when you’re on cases.’

‘It wasn’t intentional. It just sort of...happened.’

‘Ah. It does that.’

‘Apparently so.’ I fidget again with my sheet, ‘Well? Aren’t you going to ask me about it? Isn’t that what people like to do, tell each other about their dreams?’

‘Um. I don’t really – oh, fine,’ John’s long-suffering face is back, the secretly-I’m-enjoying-this-far-too-much face. ‘What was your dream about?’

I pause. ‘I don’t want to tell you.’

‘Oh for God’s – then why ask me!?’

I shrug.

‘Great. Just great.’ He collapses back on the bed, one arm drawn across his face. ‘Is there a point to this or –‘

He stops, very suddenly, as he realises that his midriff is wonderfully exposed. Before he can move, before he can even think, I twitch the bedclothes down further.

‘Move over,’ I snap. ‘It’s cold out here.’

‘Sherlock – what –‘

‘Move!’

He stares at me for a long moment. Then, with a look of something I don’t try too hard to understand, leans up on one arm and shifts to the left. There is a space, now, in his bed for me. Slightly creased, still warm from his body, it is soft and inviting. I ignore John’s slight intake of breath as my sheet drops to the floor. It isn’t the first time he’s seen me naked, though it is, perhaps, the first time he’s admitted he was looking.

I turn my face away. With lowered eyes and suddenly-clumsy hands, I lift the covers and fall into bed. No eloquent grace and perfectly-measured movements tonight – I am too tired, and this is too important. The truth possesses its own kind of eloquence; a pure kind of simplicity, a gentle rightening of all the crooked pictures in all the rooms of every house on earth.

At least, that’s what it feels like when I lie there, the world darkening, in the bed of the man – this man, my man, my brave soldier – and close my eyes. He’s moved away, hovering, uncomfortably, on the edge of the mattress. He has no pillows. I suppose I’ve stolen them. The gap between us is spun by our body heat.

‘John,’ I mumble. My voice is a whisper, a course drawn-out fragment of itself. I sound oddly weak and young. Even more odd that I shouldn’t mind.

I can hear him breathing.

Then – lightly, oh so delicately, the trace of tentative fingertips at my back.

‘Sherlock, are you alright?’

His voice is low, concerned. For once, the brittle twists of male banter, the sharp retorts of just-friends, all that static noise - have chased themselves out to their inevitable conclusion. They’ve left us broken, weary. Too tired to pretend any more.

My eyes are open, staring out into the dark. I cannot see his face. His breathing is behind me, soft stirrings of the air between us. The fingers on my skin blaze white-hot. I swallow.

‘I had a bad dream.’

‘So you keep on saying.’

My mouth works and nothing comes out. My mind is blank. My hand moves of its own accord and suddenly I have reached behind and pulled John closer, pulled him behind me so his arm is cradled against my chest and fixed, firmly, beneath my own. His resistance is minimal. There is a second or two – a moment of _is this, are we, is he, oh God –_ before, suddenly, a delightful warmth on my back. In the dark, he finds my body with his own. His chest against my skin, his forehead against the back of my neck. We fit together as if we were made for this and for the first time in my life I marvel at the simplicity of the human design, its elegance.

How long do we lie there? A century? A decade? I lose track of time as we teeter, on the brink of something I could only look at with both eyes shut. How strange, how incredibly strange that it should feel pleasant, not cloying, to feel another person on my skin, another person’s heat and sweat and breath and fire. So intimate. I feel like I am nineteen and shooting up for the first time. I am giddy and light-headed as if this bed was at the centre of a great earthquake, a catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude.

‘Sherlock?’

He does it. He breaks the silence. I pray, fervently, that we aren’t going to _talk_ about this. A rustle of the bedclothes, a sudden rush of hateful cold air against my back as he sits up. A concerned hand on my shoulder.

‘Jesus, Sherlock, you’re shaking – are you – what’s the matter?’

‘I’m not high, if that’s what you were wondering.’

‘I wasn’t,’ he pauses. ‘Though, you are naked in your flatmate’s bed at three o’clock in the morning. Now, I know I’m no detective but – ‘

‘Take my advice: if you finish that sentence, you'll end up regretting it.’

‘Is that a _threat?_ ’

‘It’s a fact.’

He pauses. It’s all so strange, not quite right – the normal rules have been torn up and sent flying ever since I leapt off a building three and a half years ago. A fact further complicated by my present situation. _Oh, John. I never meant for this to happen._

‘Alright, well, I’ll let you sleep it off - whatever it is,’ he sighs, pushing the covers off. I whirl around, abruptly, and manage to catch a fistful of his t-shirt. Halfway up, we stagger, off balance, and I am left shocked and appalled at the sheer power, the raw need in my voice. I prop myself up on an elbow, hair tumbling into my eyes.

‘No!’

‘Sherlock, what the hell – ‘

He has no time to finish that sentence. I don’t think. For once, just one second in my pathetically manic little life, I don’t let myself think.

I launch myself at him, all teeth and limbs and desperate need. When my mouth finds John’s, it is more of a collision than a kiss -  it is with a sense of anger, of loss, of desire, of some things I cannot name and some things I don’t want to. My hands scrabble at his back, my body presses into his as if of its own accord, working its way inside him, as close to him as I possibly can be. I don’t know what I am doing and I don’t know if I care – I simply press my mouth to his and revel in the deep dark taste of him, all tongue and teeth and yes – there was need, there, too. His need. He was pressing back against me, mouth open, hands open, scrabbling at my back...

I moan. I can't help it.

As if suddenly awoken from a dream, John pulls away. When I reach for him again, he presses two hands into my shoulders, gently restraining me.

‘Okay. What the actual – ‘

‘Oh, why are you talking!? Talking’s boring! There are so many other more _interesting_ things we could do.’

I observe – of course I do, I always observe, but until now have I ever really noticed? – the effect my words have on John. I follow the signs like a map across his body. Sweating temples, flushed neck, rapidly-pulsing vein...my eyes drop, as if by their own accord, to the swelling in his pants.

_So. This is what it’s like, to want someone._

‘Sherlock – I don’t – I’m not...this isn’t...’

I give him my best withering glare. ‘Don’t be tedious. You can’t very well turn around and pretend you don’t want me.’

‘I wasn’t going to!’

He stops, seemingly shocked at what just came out of his mouth. I raise my eyebrows and settle back on my feet, waiting. I can afford to be smug, now.

‘I...I just mean, we should – we need to talk about this. Especially if you’re coked up on god knows what –‘

Irritation, growing hot within my stomach. Masking something else there. Hurt? Bad memories. Why did it always have to be about the drugs?

‘I _told_ you, I’m clean. For God’s sake, John, if you could just listen –‘

‘No, you listen to me! You listen to me, for a change, will you?’

I snap my mouth shut. ‘Fine. Just hurry up about it.’

‘Why? ‘Fraid you might change your mind?’

‘Don’t be absurd.’ I sniff, then pause. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Thought so.’ His voice is thin and tight.  He slumps down looking small and depressed. ‘What are you doing, Sherlock? I mean, really. Is this some sort of experiment? A game? Or – or a deal? I know I haven’t been myself lately, I’m sorry about that, but you can’t just expect things to go back to normal straight away – ‘

‘Do you want me?’

My voice cuts through his babbling, leaving it a disconnected, severed, formless thing. He stares at me, as if in supplication. As if I’ve trapped him.

‘I...I don’t...oh God, I don’t even know anymore,’ he rubs a hand over his face, averting his eyes, ‘I can’t –‘

‘I want you.’ 

And, there it was. Suddenly, I’d fallen. The abyss no longer lay, howling, at my feet. I was deep inside it, and falling fast. Enough, then. I’d made my move – to abandon games, to upend the board – and now had to sit back and let the chips fall as they may.

‘You...you do?’ John’s face is a picture of astonishment. Mouth pink and hair ruffled from our breathless collision of lips, he was a thing of beauty and I allow myself amoment of rare aesthetic indulgence. The London skyline, the harsh elegance of the periodic table – and John Watson, bleary-eyed and half-fucked. My tastes, it would seem, were widening.

‘I was about to demonstrate as much, but someone insisted on _talking...’_

Again, I can't suppress a grin as John swallows and looks away. Such a strange, heady feeling – this pleasure in another person’s pleasure. New, and unexpected. But not completely unwelcome.

‘I...I don’t understand. I didn’t think you...had those sort of feelings. At least, not for me. Not for anyone, expect Irene, maybe. I don’t know. I thought you – I thought I – I thought...’

‘Too much thinking. Not enough touching.’

John stares at me, mouth quirking up in a half-smile I ached to lick. ‘Who are you and what have you done with Sherlock Holmes?’

‘I had a dream. It reminded me that I spend my whole life thinking. It’s all I can do. All I was ever much good at, I suppose.’ I run my hand through my hair and force myself to look at him. ‘The dream scared me. Yes, I was scared. It made me realise just how much thinking I'm doing, how little living...because I'm scared. Just look at me! So vulnerable and weak and pathetic – even as I boast my disassociation, I flaunt my indifference, I surround myself with friends and colleagues and – oh, God, it’s not...I’m not. I mean, I am. I don’t care for anyone. Anyone except you.’

John is very quiet and very still.

‘I...I’ve never been interested in this before.’ I say. Why does it feel like a confession? ‘I hate the body. It’s all just...meaningless. Transport. A waste of time. But you...you’re different. You make it worthwhile.’

‘You’re actually serious.’

‘Of course.’ I look at him in surprise. ‘I just don’t understand why we have to sit and talk about our feelings like a pair of schoolgirls –‘

‘Because I’m straight and you’re a sociopath and three years’ ago you died in my arms, that’s why!’

‘Last night you died in mine.’

‘...what?’

I swallow. ‘I’m...never mind.’

‘What do you mean – ‘

‘The dream, John! I dreamt you died. Blood on the pavement. Nasty gunshot from a case. It could happen, you know. And instantly, I...it was awful. I couldn’t stop thinking about that time, that time after I came back and you kissed me and I –‘

‘We don’t need to talk about that.’

‘No, I did, I acted like a dick and I apologise, I really, really do. I just...people for me, for so long, have meant nothing but tedium and trouble and pain. I’m not normal, John. I don’t react to things the same way you do, and –‘

He silences my malformed words with his lips placed over mine. I gasp, involuntarily, at the sudden shock of contact – contact half-anticipated in stolen moments, contact most, most desired – the sheer raw _need_ behind it. I breathe into his open mouth, a half-formed thought _oh god I don’t know what I’m doing_ chasing around my skull, until John moves away and begins trailing soft kisses down my neck. My fists bunch involuntarily, and I breathe out steadily, trying to keep myself calm and staring at the ceiling because this is so strange and so good and so new and I just can’t, I just can’t believe I am doing this, that this is happening, that anything involving this pitiful meat case could be this thrilling, this all-encompassing, this imperative. Open mouthed, I stare at the top of John’s head as his beautiful, wet mouth works down, further down. I almost lose control completely when his tongue flicks out to lick one sensitive nipple.

‘Oh, fuck,’ I whisper.

John pauses, looking up at me slyly. ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself.’

I can only stare at him in a mute appeal. For once, for one beautiful frozen second, my brain is numb, silent, the army of ant-like thoughts chasing their way around my skull has vanished. There is only one desire, to get as close to John as I possibly can. My cock twitches at the thought of it. I can’t help it. I feel dirty and conflicted and half-mad with lust as he resumes his soft worship of my body, exploring my torso with lips and eyes and tongue.

He pauses when he reaches my naval. The evidence of my need is there, blatant, unashamed – revoltingly, pathetically human. Dark hair springing in a trail down to my cock, it strains up as if eager for John, for his lips and his hands and his love. It’s more than I have ever acknowledged about myself, this strange, strange process in which I always professed no interest. There is no denying it now. I am just weak, in the end. I am weak and pathetic and horribly, horribly exposed. I stare at it in disgust, and am about to twitch the sheet back and make some sneering comment, some remark to disguise how vulnerable and naked and needing I am in flesh. Then I see his face.

John is staring at my cock like it is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his life. Hardly daring to breathe, he moves his face closer so his mouth is almost level with it. As if in slow-motion, I watch as he nudges it with his nose, rubbing it against his lips.

‘Oh, Sherlock,’ he says in a voice that hitches and breaks, ‘I love being close to you like this.’

I moan in response. It’s all I can do. His soft touch sends electric pulses of sensation throbbing throughout my body, vicious curling tendrils of need and reciprocation, and it is better than I could ever have imagined. In a few short moments, it has all been washed away - the disappointingly prosaic adolescent experimentation, the almost ostentatious rejection of physicality that came later.

 _It’s John,_ I think blearily to myself, _it could only ever be John._

John, my John, looks up at me. He is crouched on the mattress in front of me, one hand on my thigh, other curled around my slender waist. He nuzzles my cock again with his mouth and I feel my eyes close.

‘Is this okay?’ he breathes. I can feel his words, hot on my cock. I swallow weakly and keep my eyes closed. His next words feel more remote. ‘I want you, Sherlock. That’s...pretty obvious. But most of all, I want you to want me.’

‘I do.’ I swallow. My voice is rasping and strained, ‘I...I need you. God, right now all I can think of is your mouth around my cock.’

‘Like this?’ I can hear the purr in his voice, the certain-sure pleasure of giving pleasure. My hips buckle in anticipation. There is a fraction, a minute second and then – _oh God_ – my arms almost give out and I have to work hard at staying upright. His mouth is warm, and wet, and so soft and so, so good. He starts with a couple of teasing licks and kisses, little ones, chaste ones, wet-mouthed ones, lustful ones, light on the head – then, eyes fixed on mine, John takes my cock deep into his mouth. I close my eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by the influx of new data. I can’t process it, I can’t catalogue it – all of my old defence mechanisms have faded away to nothing, and I am naked and alone, gasping and shuddering in the face of our arousal, of our need.

He works slowly, gracefully, as if there is no rush, as if we are the only two people on the planet and this moment would last forever. As if we could spend all eternity like this – two people joined, for a single moment, of giving pleasure and receiving it. His mouth, as it sucks and caresses and worships, is all I know in the world. My head tips back, and I sink further down on my elbows. Somehow, weak and half-mad with pleasure as I am, I cannot bring myself to fall back completely. This way, I can steal a look at the top of John’s head as he works between my legs.

I cannot help but think it a beautiful sight to see him as he works, so dedicated and quiet. So completely absorbed in me and us and this moment that spins out and stretches and expands between us, filling the room and the house and the whole night with sighs and moans and disgustingly sexy wet noises.

‘Oh...John!’

I fall back, I fall back and my head is cradled in the soft bedsheets of this bed – our bed, a second bed, who wouldn’t be needing a second bed in the future – and I cannot stop crying, or laughing, as my hips buck and arch and I feel John respond, feel him moan as I rush through him like liquid fire.

I am losing it, I am losing him, it is all shrinking and it is all dwindling and somehow I am not me and he is not him and I am not just a body and he is not just a body – we are two souls, and this is the only way we can truly touch. In flesh, we are limitless. In flesh, we are united.

I stare at the ceiling and feel my limbs relax in a lazy sprawl. John hovers, as if uncertain, at the edge of my vision. As soon as I am able, I marshal my thoughts and find him, breathless and needy-mouthed in the dark. He is looking at me, looking at me with something close to adoration on his face – though it is not just adoration, it is affection and amusement and a deep, private, secret something that blooms out of the corners of his lips and the depths of his eyes.

I am good with words. I can make them spin and dance and leap and shout and whisper and sigh and always – _always_ – obey me. But now, as we looked into each other’s eyes, I know that my words are weak and pathetic and only a fraction of an echo, a pitiful fragment of the whole that lies between us. It is thick and solid and unshakeable. It is coffee in the morning, it is banter at a crime scene, it is the wordless, silent void of our lives absent from each other.

‘I love you,’ I say.

I hadn’t apologised before. Not really, not properly. Nothing beyond a hint of embarrassment at how long it had taken me to make my triumphant return. I hadn’t thought it necessary. I had seen his grief, his devastation, in an objective sort of way – but I hadn’t truly felt it.

I see, now, in John’s half-sad smile and swollen lips, the tenderness with which he pressed a thumb to the corner of my mouth, that he understands.

‘I love you,’ he replies.

I do not smile. It feels too trite for such a moment. Instead, I pull him close. His body arranges itself against me. Cheek to chest, arm to waist, my skinny hip jutting into his soft stomach. Again, I falter at the _rightness_ of it. The simple perfection of my flesh against his.

My heart beats in time with his. I trail an arm around his waist and wonder, with weak-kneed anticipation, what his arse would feel like. What it would feel like kissing, what it would feel like fucking, what it would be like to make John go all weak-kneed and trembling and unable to marshal a single one of his thoughts except – _God, I love you, I love you, I love you._

There would be time. There would always be time for that. Finally, I could see that flesh was flesh and though mine undoubtedly was weak and pathetic, there was one person to whom it was infinitely fascinating and wonderful and valuable. One person who possessed me with need and made me weak with desire. One person who completed and redeemed me with every second of his continued existence.

John.


End file.
